Milan Made Easy

The Salone Del Mobile, the newly concluded Milan furniture fair, is the most important event on the design calendar. Each year 175,000 people flock to the streets of Italy's commercial capital to see the new wares on offer by 1,600 companies. Navigating the Milan fair is no easy feat, and the brave first-time visitor who comes without an experienced guide is likely to be overwhelmed by the vastness of it all. There's the trade show bit, hundreds of booths in the Milan convention center, the Fiera. There are the cocktails, held each night at various showrooms around town so that cutting-edge designers from the world over have an opportunity to mix and mingle. And there are the installations. Cappellini's is the most famous and usually the most fun, focusing as much on partying as on product. This year, to highlight a new "Swimming Pool" collection of Pucci fabrics on its furniture, Cappellini had bathing-suit-clad models lounging on the lounges. There are a slew of published guides to lead one through the fair, but they only add to the confusion. How many years would it take to become a master of Milan? Says Gareth Williams, a curator at London's Victoria and Albert Museum: "Several."

Which is just one of the reasons Williams went to the fair this year in a van, which he loaded with his top picks, drove back to London and installed them in just eight days in the V & A's new contemporary space. He selected 70 of what he considered the most important pieces on display in Milan and assembled them in an exhibition called "Milan in a Van," on display until June 9.

Glossy design magazines devote plenty of pages to the Milan fair, but this is furniture — better to see it up close. "Judging by the way people are pawing the pieces, people do want to see these things in person," Williams says. A problem, aside from the pawing, is that for every one of the fair's 175,000 visitors there are 175,000 different opinions on what constitutes best of show. Nonetheless, Williams came back with some winners. Universally loved was the tree-branch chandelier designed by Tord Boontje using Swarovski crystal. Williams selected only one of Milan's reissues: the "bad-tempered chair," designed by Ron Arad and made of carbon fiber by Vitra, was originally launched by Vitra as the "well-tempered" chair and made of stainless steel in the 1987. Also of interest at the V&A is the section titled "One Designer's Fair," a look at a variety of items by Dutch designer Marcel Wanders, including a patterned black table that had other designers in heated debate as to what it was made made of. Plywood, it turned out, embossed and then stained to resemble leather.

The other drawback of "Milan in a Van" is that much of the fair's excitement is hard to capture. "The fair is not the interesting bit, it's the way various companies take over spaces and create installations of work," says Sarah Gaventa, a design curator at Scarlet Projects in London and a longtime Salone attendee. "It can be quite emotive. And that's what people go for." In an attempt to capture that excitement, "Milan in a Van" includes a documentary video of the fair. "The great thing about this show is that it shows museums can be spontaneous," says Gaventa. "It's the first thing in a gallery dedicated to contemporary design, and the fair just ended last week. How contemporary is that?" About as contemporary as the highways allow.

COLLABORATION
Seeing the Lights
Some of the most fun in Milan comes from seeing which unusual suspects show up. The 107-year-old Austrian crystal-maker Swarovski has been making a splash in the fashion world by collaborating with edgy designers including Julien MacDonald and Alexander McQueen. This year Swarovski tried to make the same impact in Milan by teaming up with young industrial-design talents. The mission? To reinvent the chandelier. The seven resulting works did just that. Hella Jongerius made a chandelier frock. Georg Baldele created a rectangular "Glitter Box." But the favorite of V&A curator Gareth Williams was Tord Boontje's "Design Blossom," a tree branch strung with lights and crystals. The creations are all one-of-a-kind prototypes, but Clare Kubicki, spokeswoman for Swarovski, says the company hopes that the manufacturers of the chandeliers will put them into production. After the exhibition finishes its tour of New York, Paris and London this year, demand shouldn't be a problem.